Economic Justice Category Posts

ST. PAUL LEGAL LEDGER CAPITOL REPORT
Opposition by many whites to civil rights for blacks, in the South and elsewhere, was based not just on visceral racial bigotry, but on a fundamental misunderstanding of economics and sociology.
In the view of many white farmers and workers, especially those on the lower rungs of society, if you gave your socioeconomic inferiors more opportunity to compete with you, or allowed them the education and resour... Read More

ST. PAUL LEGAL LEDGER CAPITOL REPORT
USA Today recently published an op-ed with a headline as stark and simple as any you’ll see in the ongoing debate over causes and remedies for our widening student success gaps along lines of income and race, and our overall decline on global education rankings.
That headline: “A poverty, not education, crisis in the U.S.’’
Addressing the predictable hand-wringing over our nation&... Read More

ST. PAUL LEGAL LEDGER CAPITOL REPORT
A heated exchange about causes and possible responses to widening economic inequality broke out recently among some of the Minnesota Legislature’s more senior leaders in a meeting of the House-Senate Legislative Commission on Planning and Fiscal Policy.
The clash pitted Senate Minority Leader David Hann and state Rep. Greg Davids, who essentially argued that inequality trends were normal or unimporta... Read More

ST. PAUL LEGAL LEDGER CAPITOL REPORT
As sure as a cold front follows a December snowfall, the end-of-year economic forecast and the state budget projections bring on the howls that Minnesota government is too big and taxes have to be cut.
The latest forecast shows a $1 billion variance to the positive, and evidence abounds that Minnesota’s economy is performing well above national averages, despite predictions that the 2013 tax increase... Read More

ST. PAUL LEGAL LEDGER CAPITOL REPORT
One of our nation’s more courageous “one-percenters” explains on a popular YouTube video — and in a movie soon to be released — how having 1,000 times as much money as the average worker does not create jobs or as much economic activity as putting more of that money in the average family’s hands.
Nick Hanauer, CEO of a West Coast company that makes pillows, notes that un... Read More